Insight
Lee: Distributed energy faces crushing operational overhead compared to utility-scale projects
“And now if you're doing distributed, it's a million dollars rather than a billion. So you might have a thousand times the amount of data at every single one of those stages, a thousand models, a thousand PDF documents or contracts, a thousand counterparties. S…”
Insight
Lee: Financial standardization fails without dedicated coordinators and aligned commercial incentives
“And so the two things really missing, right is first and foremost the build of the coordinators, right? Sometimes it's the government, sometimes it's an industry group, other times it's a financial institution or organizations like ours that are really leaning…”
Insight
Lee: Vague terms like 'bankable off-taker' are meaningless without quantitative criteria
“Like, I need a bankable, you know, off-taker, and I need an experienced EPC, right? Like, those are meaningless words in many ways, right?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lee: Sufficient deal volume exists to securitize commercial solar and energy efficiency
“And there's more than enough, like, in certain asset classes, right? Community, solar, commercial solar assets, multifamily energy efficiency, the volume of deals has been done, but can we bundle them together, find somebody who's willing to warehouse and be i…”
Insight
Lee: $1M clean energy deals are not 1,000x simpler than $1B deals
“A one million-dollar deal is more simple than a
Billion dollar deal, but not a thousand times less. It still has its own contracts, counterparties, models to deal with all of that.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lee: Traditional Financiers Historically Found Small Community Energy Projects Unbankable
“This is capital allocated towards the smallest of deals, often to counterparties and projects that prior financiers found unbankable or developers thought were not worth the time because it's a complicated deal and very tiny.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lee: SMBC found infrastructure projects under $100M unfeasible due to process costs
“We've worked with SMBC, for example, and they were like, you know, and from their perspective, look, anything under a hundred million dollars would be really difficult to invest in because of such a taxing process they have up front and ongoing.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lee: Banyan software delivers 15% to 60% time savings for banks
“When we sort of did the end-to-end analysis for where we could save time, we were showing anywhere from 15 to 16, 60, six-zero percent savings on their processes that go through the origination and underwriting flow, right?”
Opinion
Lee: Standardizing the $27B GGRF pool can unlock distributed generation capital
“And so if you can work for this smaller pool of twenty seven billion dollars, it could definitely work for the larger pool of many more billions that are already in play in, in the DG space.”
Opinion
Lee: Private market infrastructure investing functions as an inefficient black box
“And yet, private market infrastructure is a black box. Instead, it's like, here's my data room with 10,000 documents. Let's engage in a multi-month process to understand whether I want to make an investment or not.”
Disclosure
Lee: A collective of lenders representing billions are actively sharing benchmarking data
“We have a collective of our lenders representing billions of dollars of assets, pipelines, portfolios, willing to share and do this exercise to say, let's figure out where the market's at and where the baseline for the demand of pipeline is.”
Assertion Supported
Lee: Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund directs $27B to local lenders
“That twenty-seven billion dollars, is it's earmarked not only for helping scale existing green banks and institutes, but really encourage that the local CDFIs, the local lenders that have the relationships with the communities should be also developing solar p…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lee: A Green Bank Spent Over 1,400 Hours Solely on Compliance
“I saw that one was spending over 1400 hours just on compliance, right? Like, not on portfolio management, not on originating and underwriting, just on keeping compliance of key obligations. Almost an entire person doing that.”
Disclosure
Lee: Banyan originally expected clean energy finance standards to emerge organically
“When we thought about standards at Banyan, we were like, it'll be organic, right? We're gonna get a developer here, A lender there, a sponsor there, they all use the platform, and they all want to track IRR the same way, so organically, we're going to start to…”
